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If IBM made toasters...
They would want one big toaster where people bring bread to be
submitted for overnight toasting. IBM would claim a worldwide
market for five, maybe six toasters.
If Microsoft made toasters...
Every time you bought a loaf of bread, you would have to buy a
toaster. You wouldn't have to take the toaster, but you'd still
have to pay for it anyway. Toaster'95 would weigh 15000 pounds
(hence requiring a reinforced steel countertop), draw enough
electricity to power a small city, take up 95% of the space in
your kitchen, would claim to be the first toaster that lets you
control how light or dark you want your toast to be, and would
secretly interrogate your other appliances to find out who made
them. Everyone would hate Microsoft toasters, but nonetheless
would buy them since most of the good bread only works with
their toasters.
If Apple made toasters...
It would do everything the Microsoft toaster does, and 5 years
earlier, but would only toast bread sold by Apple.
If Xerox made toasters...
You could toast one-sided or double-sided. Successive slices
would get lighter and lighter. The toaster would jam your bread
for you.
If Tandy made toasters...
The staff would sell you a toaster, but not know anything about
it. Or you could buy all the parts to build your own toaster.
If Oracle made toasters...
They'd claim their toaster was compatible with all brands and
styles of bread, but when you got it home you'd discover the
Bagel Engine was still in development, the Croissant Extension
was three years away, and that indeed the whole appliance was
just blowing smoke.
Does DEC still make toasters?...
They made good toasters in the '80s, didn't they?
If Hewlett-Packard made toasters...
They would market the Reverse Polish Toaster, which takes in
toast and gives you regular bread.
If Cray made toasters...
They would cost $16 million but would be faster than any other
single-slice toaster in the world and would toast 64,000
thousand pieces of bread at the same time.
If The Rand Corporation made toasters...
It would be a large, perfectly smooth and seamless black cube.
Every morning there would be a piece of toast on top of it.
Their service department would have an unlisted phone number,
and the blueprints for the box would be highly classified
government documents. The X-Files would have an episode about
it.
If the NSA made toasters...
Your toaster would have a secret trap door that only the NSA
could access in case they needed to get at your toast for
reasons of national security.
If Sony made toasters...
The ToastMan, which would be barely larger than the single piece
of bread it is meant to toast, could be conveniently attached to
your belt.
And if Turnpike made toasters? ......
They'd have a large grey button which pops up and asks "Do you
want to toast now?" ... "Are you really really sure you want to
toast now" ... "Aw, think about the advantages of cancelling
first" ... "OK, if you must" ... "Sending message to Demon:
stoke the boilers, crank up the ROMPs, posting toast to Demon".
"Toast failed to connect to server" ... "Expiring toast now"
"Two pieces of toast expired"
If Sun Microsystems made toasters ......
All other toaster manufacturers would be licencing Sun's
Krakatoaster
as a means of delivering all types of bread, butter, jam, &c over
the
internet to you for online toasting, irrespective of who actually
made
your toaster. Unwanted ingredients would be removed in the same way.
Currently available would be images of spinning toast, bouncing
toast,
flying toast, but still no adible toast. Sun would be currently
working
on a method of preventing unwanted enzymes from also getting in and
Their latest product would be called BOS Toastmaster (from Butter
On-line Solutions) and would be a toast-scraper for the IBM Advanced
Toaster/400. Toastmaster would take current AT/400 jam-streams and
put
them all over the toaster to make it look GUI.
turning the bread mouldy thereby clogging the toaster.
Meanwhile, Toastcrape Communications, although making their popular
Toastscrape 2 toast butterer "Krakatoaster enabled", would be
desperately adding proprietary extensions to Hyper Toast Marg-up
Language version 3 in a bid to maintain their dominance of the toast
buttering market.
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